Posts tagged with MEN AND BOYS

Like too many young men in his East Oakland neighborhood, 21-year-old Shaka Perdue spent the earlier part of his youth “living like I was becoming a statistic,” as he put it. At 16, he landed in juvenile hall after robbing a pedestrian in broad daylight. Two years later a friend was shot right in front of him in a drive-by. “In Oakland, you run into all the people you have problems with,” he explained.

Perdue still hangs out in the neighborhood — but he now wears a stethoscope around his neck. He is one of 90 or so graduates of EMS Corps, a pioneering five-month program spearheaded by the Alameda County Health Care Services Agency that trains young men of color to be qualified emergency medical technicians. “You are the first person to approach the patients,” Perdue said of his future as an E.M.T. “The nurses and doctors get them after they’re stabilized in the field.”

Started in 2012, the corps is a novel effort to recruit, train and mentor a new generation of emergency medical professionals: young men growing up in communities in which concentrated poverty, violence and unemployment are well-documented barriers to health and longevity. Graduates like Perdue have a singular perspective on health disparities — they’ve lived them.

“The young men who are vilified as noncontributing members of society are not the problem,” said Alex Briscoe, the agency’s energetic director, who got his start as a dropout prevention counselor at a tough Oakland high school. “They’re the solution.”Read more…

WE have begun to pay attention to the harmful effects that America’s extremely high levels of incarceration have on former prisoners and their families, particularly in African-American neighborhoods, but we’re still missing part of the story. Our get-tough turn didn’t just send millions of African-American men to prison and return them home with felony convictions. It expanded the scope of policing and court supervision in poor black neighborhoods, radically altering the way life is lived there.

In 2002, during my sophomore year of college, I moved into a working-class-to-poor African-American neighborhood in Philadelphia, and got to know a group of friends in their teens and early 20s who hung out together in the alleyways and on back porches. I watched the police stop and search young men in the street, chase them, make arrests, raid houses in the middle of the night and threaten girlfriends and mothers who refused to cooperate. I saw the police take young men into custody, not only on the streets, but at their jobs, in their mothers’ homes, at funerals and even in a hospital delivery room.

Children in the neighborhood played games of chase in which one child played the role of the cop. The child would push the other child down on the ground and stick his hands in imaginary handcuffs: “I’m going to lock you up! I’m going to lock you up, and you ain’t never coming home!” I once saw a 6-year-old pull another child’s pants down to attempt a cavity search.

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Credit Oliver Munday

Most of the young men I met had not finished high school and were struggling to find work. They lived with female relatives, and some sold drugs off and on. Many went to jail or prison, but before they went in, and after they came home, they lived as suspects and as fugitives. With pending cases in criminal courts, probation and parole sentences to complete or low-level warrants out for unpaid court fees or missed court dates, they worried that any encounter with the police would send them to prison. The threat of capture and confinement had seeped into the basic activities of daily living. Read more…

For several decades women’s success in the labor market was so breathtaking, so propulsive, that full gender equality seemed inevitable.

The traditional division of labor by gender was challenged from all sides. Women’s share of the labor force, husbands’ share of housework, the integration of occupations once categorized by gender and women’s share of management jobs all rocketed upward from the 1970s till sometime in the 1990s. Women went from earning fewer than 10 percent of law and medicine degrees in 1970 to earning almost half of them by the early 2000s.

The very notion of a breadwinner-homemaker ideal family descended into quaint anachronism. Men’s attitudes changed right along with women’s. Read more…

Boys score as well as or better than girls on most standardized tests, yet they are far less likely to get good grades, take advanced classes or attend college. Why? A study coming out this week in The Journal of Human Resources gives an important answer. Teachers of classes as early as kindergarten factor good behavior into grades — and girls, as a rule, comport themselves far better than boys.

The study’s authors analyzed data from more than 5,800 students from kindergarten through fifth grade and found that boys across all racial groups and in all major subject areas received lower grades than their test scores would have predicted. Read more…

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

2:05 p.m. | Updated This post originally contained an article that was not ready for publication. The correct version appears below.

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In the wake of the school massacre in Newtown, Conn., and the resulting renewed debate on gun control in the United States, The Stone will publish a series of essays this week that examine the ethical, social and humanitarian implications of the use, possession and regulation of weapons. Other articles in the series can be found here.

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Adam Lanza was a young man. Jacob Roberts was a young man. James Holmes is a young man. Seung-Hui Cho was a young man. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were young men.

We can all name a dozen or so hypotheses about why they kill: their parents’ unlocked gun cabinet, easy access to weapons on the Internet, over- or under-medication, violent video games and TV programs, undiagnosed or misdiagnosed mental disorders, abusive or indifferent parents, no stable social network, bullying. However, young women are equally exposed to many of the same conditions yet rarely turn a weapon on others. This leaves us wondering about the young men.

There is something about life in the United States, it seems, that is conducive to young men planning and executing large-scale massacres. But the reasons elude us.

The first reaction to the horror and bloodshed of a mass killing like the one in Newtown, Conn., is a rekindling of the gun control debate. I happen to believe, along with many others, that the repeated mandate we give to the National Rifle Association and its lobby, and the complacency with which we allow our politicians to be subject to the will of gun manufacturers is odious.

In the United States, the angry white man has usurped the angry black man.

Limiting access to weapons is certainly a pragmatic albeit incomplete solution to the United States’ propensity for murder. However, were the guns to vanish instantaneously, the specter that haunts our young men would still hover in silence, darkly.

Most historians now argue — and contemporary documents bear them out — that the leaders of the Confederacy were, above all, motivated by a desire to protect their system of slavery. Leaving the Union, they believed, was the surest way to preserve an institution that was now threatened by the newly-elected, and self-proclaimed anti-slavery, president, Abraham Lincoln.

But if slavery motivated the leaders — almost all of them slave-owners — where did that leave the vast majority of Southerners, the men who owned no slaves but filled the ranks of the Confederate army? For them, the answer was less about the slave economy or states’ rights than the perceived threat that abolition posed to their very identity as white men. Read more…